Après le gym I often pass through Civic Video on the way home. It is a short cut of sorts with some added benefits. The other day I saw ‘The Sound of My Voice’ on the shelf. It caught my eye because (1) there was only one specimen there and (2) the cover art was arresting. One of my criteria for considering a video is that it is not there in dozens of copies. Figure that out. For the cover art, have a look.
Once in hand I realized it was the same crew that made ‘Another Earth’ (2011) , and I was hooked. I have commented on ‘Another Earth’ in another post.
I watched ‘The Sound of My Voice’ the other night, and have no idea what to make of it. It is studied in its ambiguity and enigmatic in its approach, and I like that. Subtle, open-textured, mysterious, and in no hurry. That kept me interested. It seemed to me it was a variant, on a micro-budget, of ‘Contact’ (1997). In ‘Contact’ the aliens approach humanity in a surprising way. In ‘The Sound of My Voice’ the surprising contact is from the future….or is it? That is the ambiguity.
There are many discussions in the ether, e.g. IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Facebook and more.
Cut and paste this link to find it on The Internet Movie Data Base:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748207/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
More importantly, there is a measured review from Roget Ebert, the greatest, at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sound-of-my-voice-2012
Better yet see it for yourself. It will leave you thinking and it is a vote against Hollywood. Two good things there.
Author: Michael W Jackson
Always make your last shot.
Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir (2002).
I liked The Lords of Discipline so much I wanted more Conroy. This book appealed to me because it was about basketball. First the good, then the not so good.
The modesty is disarming. The description of the atmosphere of games is intoxicating. The account of plays is exhilarating. The attributes ascribed to other players, especially opponents (which made me think of Jerry Nicholarson, Mike Aspen, and Fred Hare – an honour to mix with them) are graceful and generous. The unity and division of the team through the season is moving. It started as a band of individuals but through the season often played like a team where the whole is greater than its parts. The descriptions of hot and cold players is right. The figures of speech and turns of phrase are easy and, at times, elevating. The recitation of the responsibilities of the point guard is informative, and that made me think of Captain Leo. The accounts of talented athletes who threw it away reminded me of Bob Krebsbach.
The effort in the last chapter to sum up the book from the point of view of a point guard, however, is not based on those responsibilities, and so occasions more dad-hating. The modesty becomes repetitive and even cloying.
Mel, the one-dimensional toxic coach, who never has a good word to say, who thinks screaming is motivation, who seems to have nothing to offer but the above is cardboard I am afraid. It is only at about 300 pages of chronicle of Mel’s malice is it implied that he taught Conroy some things about the game.
Dad-hatred piled high and deep enough for a PhD in the Oedipus complex, though there is nothing complex about it. (I also bought his cookbook, and guess what, dad-hatred is to be found there, too.)
Ditto his love-hate relationship with The Citadel. He just cannot say it often enough, well yes he can say it too often.
It is a gym rat’s adage. Only leave the gym when you have made your last shot. Never leave the gym on a miss. Superstition perhaps. But more practice never hurts.
John Tyler: The Accidental President by Edward Crapol
I did know that John Tyler had been president. Why? Because of that very early campaign slogan, ‘Tippiecanoe and Tyler, too.’ Look it up, if it is unknown. I knew he succeeded Harrison, but that is all I knew. Yet when I read Borneman’s biography of Polk’s emergence and election, Tyler seemed an interesting if remote figure.
He is widely regarded as a failure, no doubt in part because he did not win an election in his own right.
So…..
Continue reading “John Tyler: The Accidental President by Edward Crapol”
James K. Polk by Walter Borneman
The publishers statement: The first complete biography of a president often overshadowed in image but seldom outdone in accomplishment. James K. Polk’s pledge to serve a single term, which many thought would make him a lame duck, enabled him to rise above electoral politics and to outflank his adversaries. Thus he plotted and attained a formidable agenda: He fought for and won tariff reductions, reestablished an independent Treasury, and most notably, brought Texas into the Union, bluffed Great Britain out of the lion’s share of Oregon, and wrested California and much of the Southwest from Mexico. In tracing Polk’s life and career, author Borneman show a Polk who was a decisive, if not partisan, statesman whose near doubling of America’s boundaries and expansive broadening of executive powers redefined the country at large, as well as the nature of its highest office.
Best and Brightest 2013
There is a video on You Tube that summarizes the Best and Brightest Showcase for IVth Honours Research. The address is below. Cut-and-paste into the browser address line, and have a look.
I also loaded it directly onto Facebook.
Hyperlinking does not work on this platform.
Link for Best and Brightest Pictures
The link is live for 21 more days. Have a look. Please cut-and-paste. The hyperlink tool remains inactive.
http://lft.ucc.usyd.edu.au/lft-download.cgi?id=e41d8a33d4701943cff2f35e
Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (1980)
Recommended for adults.
In anticipation of going to a conference in Charleston, South Carolina later this year I sought out novels set there. I found a couple and I started with this one. Now that I have read it I am too drained to go on to the next one right away. It is a wringing experience to follow these lords of discipline.
To say that the novel is an account of the education of four students at a college is true but without texture or meaning. The four are boys from 18 – 21 years old. The college is a military school. It is in Charleston.
The major characters, in addiiton to the four room-mates, are the president of the college, the dean of students, the family of one of the boys in the room, and a love interest for the narrator. But the major character is Charleston itself, its foliage, its seasons, its smells, its beaches, its grass, its insects, its social conventions, its colonial origins, its Confederate past, its slave past, its caste system. As a book to read before visiting Charleston it is exactly right. (Though it did not tell me why that 1920s dance is called ‘Charleston.’)
What happens? The boys learn a lot and our protagonist grows up. The novel is rich with incident and offers a flavour of that all male environment where brutality taken and brutality given is the road to manhood. To list all of the examples would make it seem a litany of violence and blasphemy, and it is not. Though there is plenty of both.
Conroy alternates very deftly between the systematic beastiality of some events at the school with lyrical descriptions of the coastal wind, or tiered reflections on love and life by the boy becoming a man. Conroy’s judgment in measuring for the reader doses of pain with relief from it is sure. He guides the reader through the distasteful parts by providing oases before moving on.
Throughout the prose is beautiful, elegiac for lost youth.
None of the characters are cardboard. Even the president, a thinly disguised representation of Douglas MacArthur, and the many who imitated him, is developed. He has his reasons, convoluted and self-serving though they be, but they are not idiosyncratic or synthetic. He is not simply a plot device. The same goes for the Dean of Students, the Commandant. He is not honest but he is trying to do what is best.
Of course the most well developed character is the narrator who tells some of this in retrospect. His inner confusions, contradictions, volte faces, his mistakes, his blunders, are very touching as he recovers from romantic rejection, deals with social ostracism, copes with responsibilities shoved onto him, is rocked by betrayal, weighs the demands of friendship…. Life is complicated at any age but the more so for youth.
The other three room-mates are also developed personalities, though we see them only in relation to the narrator. The other cadets, even the sadists, are presented as human beings, despicable though some are, and not merely as plot devices. It is a great talent that can do that. Conroy seems to be in complete control and command of the novel; he is no child prodigy but a mature observer and a seasoned ponderer on the human comedy.
All of this is played out against the times in the United States in the 1960s. Civil rights and integration of this school, and the Vietnam War in which many of the graduates of the school have already served. But always more important than these externalities is the school itself and its very Charleston cosmology.
There is enough violence, profanity, stupidity, and prejudice in the book to interest a Hollywood film producer in turning it all into slam-bang cardboard. Read the book, skip the film is my advice.
Conroy has written much else, like The Great Santini, and I will read more some time. I also plan to re-read another book about a military school. It will be Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (1947). His most arresting character was not the victim but the vicious bully.
Having finished the book and before gathering my own thoughts I looked for reviews but all I could find were hundreds of comments on Good Reads and Amazon, and those I scanned were as inane as most comments on Trip Advisor. Most are about that fascinating subject, the writer of the comment, and not about the book. These are no doubt the same twits who FaceBook their every meal. I am sure there are measured and informative reviews available but they are overgrown with the obscuring and choking vines of the Twitterati. I am left to my own devices.
Herbert Hoover, A Presidential biography
Inspired by Robert Caro’s nonpareil biography of Lyndon Johnson, I have been reading biographies of US presidents as the occasion permits. Shortly after I decided to do that I chanced up Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Reading those three volumes confirmed me in the enterprise, though one volume works suffice. I have since read Willard Randall, George Washington; David McCulloch, John Adams; Walter Borneman, James Polk; and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower.
I noticed a review of a recent book about Herbert Hoover and since it was current and available I decided it would be the Hoover biography: Gary Dean BEST, The Life of Herbert Hoover, Keeper of the Torch, 1933-1964. It covers his post-presidential years, as part of multi-volume biography, where each volume is by a different writer. Despite the title there is much reference to Hoover as president.
From the 550 pages of this book I conclude that Hoover had enormous energy and vitality and remained intellectually and political active into his 80s. He outlived many of his enemies, and all of his friends. That he was something of an intellectual, rather like T. R. Roosevelt. Hoover read a lot of books and wrote a few. He took care to do research for his many speeches and often packed them with facts and figures.
He also had a set of consistent beliefs about personal liberty that he often articulated and which informed much of this thought, action, and speech. It seems also that for all his public speaking, he was not easy with company, especially the hordes one meets at a convention. He often came, saw, spoke, and left by the side door.
In this period it was common for speeches to be reported nearly verbatim in newspapers, and often printed and distributed. They were also excerpted in newsreels shown in theatres. There was a constant demand for Hoover to speak and he did, except for the first year after leaving the White House, defeated by Franklin Roosevelt at the polls. The demand for Hoover to speak suggests that he struck a cord, as did the favorable press comment, and the audience reaction in theatres. It is too bad newsreels are gone from the silver screen because audience reactions in the darkened theatre was always uninhibited, as I recall.
I have no doubt that Herbert Hoover did much good in his life and that the reputation of his presidency has suffered in the shade cast by FDR. Having said that, in the period described in this book, Hoover appears all too often to be thin-skinned, pompous, and scheming. That he should appear thus in these pages is all the more surprising given that the author verges on hagiography in his adulation of every word, deed, and gesture Hoover made. The author is completely one-eyed. On that more at the end.
Hoover wanted to be president again, and like a lot of people who have wanted that job, he did not want to run for it, he just wanted it handed to him. So he made himself available for the Republican nomination in 1936 and again in 1940, and he opposed and undermined alternative candidates right up until the last minute. He offered mere lip-service support to the Republican nominees who emerged, Alf Landon and Wendell Wilkie, respectively. Yet he constantly felt they should pay obeisance to him, and when they did not, he withdrew further.
He spend thirty years vindicating his administration in those speeches with a mixtures of facts and figures that often made sense to him alone. He regarded every criticism of his administration as a personal slight, a smear. The author uses that word ‘smear‘ repeatedly for every objection or criticism levelled at any of Hoover’s many interjections into political life.
Hoover wanted to contribute, as World War II drew nearer, but only on his terms and in his way, and only if begged to do so. To that end he proposed some crazy ideas about food relief, and anyone who suggested his plan was not feasible or would, as it obviously would have, aided the German war effort is said, by the author, to have smeared Hoover.
Harry Truman tried to put Hoover to work and Hoover chaired several commission to streamline the Federal government. Well Truman thought the purpose was to streamline it but Hoover’s declared aim was to wind back Roosevelt’s New Deal, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, twenty years later. Despite Truman’s several efforts to flatter Hoover, it was never enough, and Hoover reveled in Joe McCarthy’s red baiting with nary a thought to conscience or consequence to judge by this book.
Even Eisenhower’s victory in 1952 left Hoover cold. Ike had other things on his mind and did not bow to Hoover, and so Hoover had few good words to say for him. I am afraid for most of the time in the period this book covers Hoover thought it was all about him. Petulant, one might say, for thirty years.
I have made several allusions to the book itself. There is no distance between the author and Hoover. If Hoover says black, then black it is. Assertions of fact are taken solely from Hoover, more than once. The book is packed with lengthy quotations from Hoover’s speeches and letters and these are transmitted without qualm or qualification and taken as read. Perhaps one page in four is such a direct quotation. The author seldom draws a conclusion from these long passages, but rather just lets them hang, often at the end of a paragraph. It becomes very tempting just to skip them since the author is not making any declared point with them.
For good or ill this is my Hoover biography.
Having acquired a taste for presidential libraries last year, I knew there was Hoover library and I just assumed that it was in Palo Alto where he lived most of his life. But one valuable fact I got from this book is that the Hoover Library, which Truman, demonstrating a magnanimity that Hoover never had, helped him achieve, is in West Branch, Iowa on I-80, which is where Hoover was born. It is a four-hour drive from Omaha through Des Moines, and I hope to visit it someday soon. It is near Amana.
Star Trek – Into Darkness
Good Trekkies that we have been since 1966, off we went to the Dendy Newtown last night to watch Start Trek: Into Darkness in 3D. Trekkies will have to see it. But many of them will be disappointed. Everything those who promote it say is true: it is high energy, it is fast and furious, it is action-packed, it has some etched characters…
It is also true to say that it seems to have been created by writers with arrested development and targetted at twelve year old boys. No doubt that is a winning formula.
It is also true to say that it quite indistinguishable from three other movies currently showing in the Dendy chain: Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, and Escape from Planet Earth. It is loud, it is trivial, it is superficial, it is one-dimensional, thoughtless, inconsistent, with a leaky plot and inexplicable action and eighty (80) minutes of gratuitous violence… It lacks the gravitas of even a Marvel Comic.
What is worse, the local reviewers seem to think that it is an authentic representation of Star Trek and thus the reason there are Trekkies like us. WRONG!
Star Trek the Original Series featured more than one meeting where the assembled staff tried to think of ways to do things, debated over a table the limits of their orders, and then went away to think about it, because thinking takes time. In many episodes not a shot was fired or a punch thrown by the crew of the Enterprise.
Thinking time in Into the Darkness is 5-6 seconds. That is perhaps indicative of how decisions were also made about the film. Or is it the reality of Bush Junior White House?
Moreover, many episodes of Star Trek: Original Series posed questions about life and humanity from start to finish. I will cite only one example: The Devil in the Dark (Season 1, Episode 25 in March 1967). There are plenty of others from Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, too. Of course, to cater to the television audience there is action, as well.
Into the Dark has many allusions to the Star Trek lore. The villain of the piece is Khan, played by Ricardo Montalban in ‘Space Seed.’ broadcast in February 16, 1967, and he reprised the role in the 1982 film. In 1967 the issue was returned soldiers. He was a great villain, as is Benedict Cumberbatch in this outing. That issue of returned soldiers remains relevant — Iraq and Afghanistan — but not when it is only an excuse for more fisticuffs.
This Captain Kirk is everything his mentor says he is, except for the potential for greatness. He is as arrogant, opinionated, and uninformed as a radio shock jock. Admittedly, he is far more handsome than any shock jock I have seen in the jungle.
There were certainly things for a Trekkie to like. The opening sequence is dazzling, albeit pointless. The Mr Spocks dialogue was delicious. And the actors were excellent at creating those familiars: Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, McCoy, Scottie, Spock, and Kirk, as well as Khan. They could do it, now if they had just had something interesting to do.
Diana Vreeland – Documentary
We watched this documentary about the redoubtable Diana Vreeland last night. Recomended for adults.
I knew nothing about Vreeland but thought the distaff side might be interested, so I borrowed it from the local Civic Video on spec. What I found was a force of nature who had no taste whatever but had drive, pride, intelligence, wit, and a capacity to learn. Her attitude seemed to be: be what you are. And strut it. She joined all of that to an enormous appetite for the world, realized through the no-expense-spared camera shoots she did for her magazines. All of this, in some measure, she passed on to those who looked at the editions of her magazines.
She was the long time editor of Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue. She was one of the models for the demanding editor in ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’
In the boundless energy, enthusiasm, and bullying she reminded me of Lyndon Johnson. She was likewise as profligate.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the story is her last assignment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where her shows, and shows they were, brought in masses of paying customers. Those successes condemned her in the eyes of the other curators, numbering her days there. It was easy to imagine meetings where curators argued that having people crowding into the Met was undesirable! I expect they did, though veiled and subtle in public.
http://www.dianavreeland-film.com